Rep. Pat Harrigan on 9/11, Afghanistan and the Lessons of America’s Forever Wars

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Full transcript:

Guy Benson: Joining us now is Congressman Pat Harrigan from North Carolina. He’s a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and he was a Green Beret. He served on active duty in the U.S. Army for years, reaching the rank of captain, and deployed multiple times to Afghanistan, which, of course, was a war that started on that terrible day 25 years ago. Congressman, welcome to the show.

Rep. Harrigan: Guy, thanks for having me. Good to be with you today.

Guy Benson: You and I are roughly the same age. I think I’m a little older. If I’m not mistaken, you were probably early in high school when this happened. What do you remember from that day?

Rep. Harrigan: I was a freshman in high school. I had just started my freshman year, and I remember coming downstairs. My mom used to make breakfast every morning, and I asked her a question about breakfast, but I didn’t get a response. I looked up, and she was totally frozen in front of the television.

At that point, there had not been a second plane hitting the building, so there were a lot of conflicting reports about what had happened and what size plane it was. A lot of people thought it was a small plane. Then I saw the second plane coming in and hitting the building, and obviously, at that point, we all knew we were under attack and that our lives were going to change.

That’s exactly what happened to everybody in America, but particularly my generation–the younger generation that was of military age and was about to be asked to step up.

Guy Benson: So, being a freshman, you were maybe 14, so you were too young to sign up yet. But you ended up going to West Point. Did you have any thought in your mind, even that day or that week, that there was a crystallizing moment where you said, “As soon as I’m able to serve, I’m going to try to get into West Point and go do this”? Was this the event that charted that path for you, or were you always considering military service? What was your process like, and how did 9/11 play into it?

Rep. Harrigan: I definitely was not considering military service before. You’re a freshman, so you’re still many years away from being able to either enlist or go into college so that you can commission as an officer.

As I was watching those who came before me go off to conflict and do their duty, you really had to sit back and say, “Well, I’m at the beginning of my life. I’m able to care very deeply about the country. I don’t like what’s happened. I think that we live in a dangerous world. I want to try to make it a safer place.”

I thought I should likely spend a portion of my life working toward the safety and security of our country. As I became old enough to potentially either enlist, go into college, or attend a service academy, it seemed like the best path for me was to go to a service academy, hone my leadership skills, and then head out and serve our country.

That’s exactly what I was fortunate enough to be able to go do.

Guy Benson: Being a cadet at one of these academies, West Point or otherwise, is an intense process and always has been, by design. I can only imagine what the atmosphere was like. I went off to college–I was a junior when this happened in high school–and 9/11 hung over my college experience and subsequent elections, as well as so much of the public controversy and decisions that were being made about war and peace.

But I went to school. You went to a different kind of school. You went to West Point. I can only imagine, in that atmosphere, how it must have felt to be training at a place like that, given that there’s always a seriousness of purpose at a place like West Point.

But on the heels of that attack, it’s not just theoretical–“If we go to war, let’s get ready.” We were at war. What was it like at West Point with the, as they called it, global war on terror absolutely raging by the time you arrived?

Rep. Harrigan: Well, you definitely had the certainty of what you were going to be doing after you graduated front of mind all the time. And so it made you very serious and very intentional about how you spent your time so that you could best prepare not only for the folks you were going to be serving with, but for yourself.

West Point still does this, and all the service academies do: They all eat meals together at the same time. It’s one of the fixtures of the service academy. They feed 4,000 people in less than 15 minutes.

During lunch, if there was a graduate who had been killed in action, they would read off his name. Everybody would become absolutely silent. All 4,000 people inside the chow hall would be completely silent. They’d read off the name, and every day it was somebody who had just graduated–somebody that people knew.

It wasn’t every day, but it happened frequently. We had many classes that lost dozens and dozens of people.

So, yeah, it made it very real for your entire experience there.

Guy Benson: And then off you went to the battlefield. We look back at the war in Afghanistan and Iraq–in many ways, a separate question, same enemy–with controversy about whether it was the right idea or not.

Afghanistan was not controversial at the time, and it wasn’t for a long time. Of course, the way everything went down at the end was highly controversial and, I think, really disgraceful.

But I do wonder, as you think back to your service in Afghanistan: Was it worth it? Did it make us safer? I think there’s probably a lot of people who grapple with that. What do you think?

Rep. Harrigan: Well, I think an interesting anecdote from my personal experience is that when I first got on the ground–I think two or three days after I got there, on my very first deployment–I was at an air-access-only combat outpost way in the middle of the Argandab Valley, a really nasty place.

Two or three days after I got there, we killed bin Laden. And I was like, “Man, I went through all of this time when I was in high school. I went through all this time in college. I went through infantry, all of that basic training, and then Ranger School. Then I did a year-long train-up to come over here. We finally come over, and we kill the guy. We accomplished the mission, right?”

And I say “we” as the United States. I’m thinking, “Well, I guess the game’s over. I got here a little bit late.”

But we had shifted the mission, right? The mission ceased to be just about killing bin Laden, and we had created an alternative narrative of creating a democracy in a place that truly was not prepared or compatible with democracy at that point in time.

And so I think the lesson from that is we need to be very careful about the conflicts that we choose to engage in. We need to not fight wars that we shouldn’t be fighting, and we always need to have the wherewithal to win the ones that we have to.

But you never allow the mission to creep. When you have mission creep, you end up in a forever war.

That was the lesson of the entirety of the global war on terror, and it’s something that we do not need to repeat again.

Guy Benson: Two follow-up questions, one having to do with that moment that you just described–the killing of bin Laden. When that word spread at your camp, having just arrived, what was the mood? How was that news received? What do you remember?

Rep. Harrigan: It was surreal because it was something that genuinely had defined the United States for 10 years. They were hunting this guy, didn’t get him.

Everybody who was alive remembers how horrible 9/11 was. And in the aftermath, the waiting, trying to confirm who it was, who was responsible, where they were, going in on October 7–almost a whole month later–that whole amount of time was a very serious time for the country, a very contemplative time.

And when we went in and we didn’t get him, it was horrible. It was really horrible, because I think Americans broadly believe in the concept of justice, and there needed to be justice for this, and justice was not served.

So, politically, the administration at the time had to create a different goal in order to kind of make things work. And that is a true folly in our nation’s history, and one that, again, we should not ever try to repeat.

Guy Benson: Was there a sense of accomplishment and celebration, like, “Hell yeah, we got him”? Or was it like, “Are we still going to stick around?” I can imagine it was all sorts of positive emotions, but also those types of questions.

Rep. Harrigan: There’s no question that there was a level of satisfaction that he was gone and that he had met his end–and he’d met it in a violent way at the hands of some of the very best special operations forces that we have–and that justice, in that regard, was indeed served.

There was not much of a question at the time, again, being 2011, 10 years after 9/11, almost 10 years after 9/11. The mission had changed long before then, when we failed to get bin Laden in the late months of 2001 and in the first quarter or so of 2002.

And so that mission had already changed and had its own permanence to it. We more jokingly than anything else said, “Well, I guess we’re done. We can head home.”

But we knew that with the new mission that we had been given, we still had a long way to go there. And indeed, we had such a long way to go that we would never ultimately get there.

Guy Benson: So much of the focus today, of course, necessarily, is on what happened 25 years ago. But in that previous answer, you were talking about avoiding forever wars and avoiding mission creep.

Then you look at the anti-American, terror-supporting regime in Iran and the action that President Trump and this administration has taken against that regime, in particular against their nuclear threat. What’s your stance on the current war? Because it’s still an echo, in a lot of ways, from 9/11.

Rep. Harrigan: Well, there’s no question that Iran and its regime is a bad actor, and it’s a bad actor of all bad actors on the global stage. They hate Americans, they have pursued nuclear weapons, and I think that no matter how anybody actually thinks or feels about this conflict and its timing, I do think at some level it was inevitable.

That being said, I’m very disappointed where we are today. I think we’ve made some principled errors in how we’ve prosecuted this conflict, and that has left us in a position where we do not have closure to the conflict today, where we could have had we pursued things a little bit differently.

Coming back to that concept of mission creep and a forever war, there are many on the right side of the aisle who are not saying that this is a forever war, and I don’t think that it is at this point. And the reason is because I have not personally detected mission creep.

I think the original five objectives remain the five objectives today. Some of those are accomplished and complete, and others remain to be resolved.

I’m going to take a pretty aggressive stance against continuing this conflict if I start to see that mission creep.

One thing that I’m not willing to do, as we are all working together to try to achieve what’s in the greatest strategic interests of the United States of America for our and future generations, as well as our allies, is take the lessons that I learned from the global war on terror about forever wars and how we get into them and how we do just enough not to lose, but fail to do what is required to actually win.

What I will not do is look back 20 years from now and say, “I did not take what I learned during the global war on terror, and I let the next generation slide into a forever war.”

I’m not willing to do that.

Guy Benson: Congressman Pat Harrigan of North Carolina, a Republican, a Green Beret, a 9/11 kid in a lot of ways from this generation that I’m a part of as well. Congressman, we appreciate your time and your reflections today.

Rep. Harrigan: Thanks for having me, Guy.